


Mercy is the Mighties' Jewel

by akathecentimetre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: AU madness, F/M, spy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-04-13 18:35:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4532856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've chased each other all over the world - yet somehow, they will always end up here. Modern-day spy!AU with illustration by <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn">JakartaInn.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Remix

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheCrackedKatana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCrackedKatana/gifts).



*

[](http://i.imgur.com/BGCreDI.jpg)  
Illustration by [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn). Click for full-size.

*

Asajj Ventress has been laying low in southern France for three weeks when she finally gets so bored that she decides her return to Paris will be in some style. To some, being cut off entirely from the world, without communications or a current newspaper or even a radio is a type of heaven; to a highly-trained assassin, on the other hand, it is akin to a very carefully-designed type of torture.

Which is why it makes total sense that she’s determined to go to the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz on her first night back, and in a fiery orange dress that just makes her pale skin (gods, save her from sun, save her from any part of the world in which she would be forced to get a fucking _tan_ ) glow ever-more luminescent and the assembled men gathered there for some incredibly posh semblance of a stag party drop their drinks and their jaws together.

She looks at the bar, and there he is; she’d been expecting him, after all. She could hardly have expected otherwise, in truth, given that every intelligence agency in the world has probably had their alarm bells ringing ever since she booked her train ticket in her own name.

By the time she stalks over to the bar, Kenobi is already halfway through his suspiciously-blue drink, and she could swear that that look in his eyes is fucking _twinkling_.

“Kenobi,” she sighs dramatically, and drapes herself as slinkily as she can manage (which, judging by the strangled cough back over at the stag party, is quite a lot) over the stool next to him, waving the attentive bartender away for the time being. “What a surprise.”

“Ventress,” he says, as arch as ever. He’s in a three-piece suit, surely too warm for the season, but it looks pretty damn good on him, all sharp edges and tailored lines. “You’re looking well.”

They’ve chased each other all over the world in these past five years.

She’d first tried to kill him in San Francisco, for a bet, just desperately trying to prove to Dooku that she was capable of ending a Jedi – of taking out one of the agents who might have been CIA or MI6 or gods only knew what else, but were really just the best of the best at making sure people like her came to quiet and unremarkable ends.

She’d failed, that first time, because Kenobi, on catching sight of her, had smiled. The bastard had fucking _smiled_ , like she was interesting, like she wasn’t a disease to be stamped out, like – even with her gun at his throat and the point of his knife pressed deep into her ribs – he fucking _knew_ her.

It was Skywalker, that little prick, who had ruined that first time. He and his little helper Tano were the Jedi trotted out to the media when the media sniffed close enough, who got cocky, who got the best results and threw words like ‘terrorist’ and ‘murderer’ in Ventress’s direction like they meant something. But Kenobi just chased her; getting close some months, being called away other months, gliding quietly behind her and cleaning up in her wake, popping up to foil an assassination in Sydney, sending a troop of local police to her safe house in Buenos Aires so that, cursing, she had to jump on the nearest getaway plane before her job was done.

Ventress had never quite understood it, in truth. But, faced with Kenobi’s apparent respect, she would have been a fool not to take advantage of it; and so she did, from city to city, continent to continent, testing him, teasing him, fucking _delighting_ in it. She remembers thinking that this felt – new, something besides what she’d always known, what she had always been good at and never questioned.

She’s won some; he’s won some. She lost in Chicago, he lost in Cape Town. In St. Petersburg, they’d stared at each other over a crowded restaurant and, nodding silently, both agreed to disappear and let the local heavies sort out their differences themselves, washing their hands clean of strangers’ bloodshed.

In Edinburgh, once, she’d been left staggering from a bullet wound to her abdomen inflicted by her mark, huddling away in a housing estate, when Kenobi found her. Ventress had closed her eyes and made her peace long before the butt of his gun cracked across her face and consigned her to darkness; when she woke, disoriented and parched, she was in a hospital bed with a nervous nurse at her side and a very familiar, suited figure quietly sitting guard at her door.

The favor has been returned, on several occasions. She’d found him in a dumpster in New York once, the quickfire victim of a disgruntled mobster inches away from jail time whose boys had left him to die in ignominy behind a dollar-slice pizzeria. “Ventress,” he’d rasped, not at all surprised, and she could hear his ribs scraping against each other when she’d pulled him out; she’d tasted his blood on her tongue as she fled, leaving him lying on his side so his punctured lungs wouldn’t drown him. She’d been left alone for almost two months after that, no doubt because even an idiot as big as Skywalker would have had to admit that they’d never have found Kenobi in time on their own.

“Why?” he’d asked once, half a year later, in one of the pods of the London Eye – where they’d greeted each other with the muted, faked surprise of two old vague-friends who hadn’t seen each other in some time. She’d been startled, briefly, by the idea that he dared to put the question into words.

“Don’t sell yourself short, darling,” she’d purred eventually, keeping her eyes fixed on Big Ben. “I’d miss you.”

“I suppose I’d have to say the same, then,” he’d said, one small hand warm on her waist.

On that particular evening, he’d allowed her a five-minute head start. He must have been feeling generous. Or worse, grateful.

Half a year after _that_ , she’d found herself thinking that this was it, this was when her account would run dry. It was his own damned fault, getting himself marooned in Cairo with only that most muscle-bound of his assistants, Alpha, for company; finding herself in possession of far greater resources, she had had no choice but to take them, and for the first time (after she’d dislocated one of his shoulders and left him hanging by it for a few hours to soften him up) she’d truly expected to see him look upon her with hatred.

Gods, but he was stubborn, though, and when she’d gone back to him and starting asking the questions they both knew she had to ask, he’d just looked at her out of his chalk-white face, livid bruises spreading down onto his neck and chest, and fucking _sighed_.

She’d had him for two weeks, much longer than she’d counted on, before Alpha finally put his meat-hook hands to good use on two of Ventress’s best agents and managed to summon in the cavalry. Two weeks to contemplate breaking his fingers and follow through on a few (but not all) of her threats, two weeks to undo buttons and slide shaking hands underneath, to watch his eyes roll back and his head slump forward, to feel his panted moans in the side of her neck.

Fuck, but it was beautiful. And he talked, oh – he talked about so many things, in mumbles or snatches of breathless song, about nothing she needed but everything she wanted to know.

Ventress had been safely away, watching via a distant videolink, when Alpha burst in amid the hail of gunfire, unhooked the chains, forced the errant joint back into its proper place (Kenobi had screamed, then, finally, before going limp, and she felt nothing but jealousy that she hadn’t been there to hear it in person) and dragged them both the hell out of there. Skywalker had hunted her for months for that little episode, most of the way across Asia Minor and deep into India, before she’d managed to lose him in Kolkata and take two weeks for herself in Bali. The sun and happiness and tang of salt there had made her teeth itch.

The news that Kenobi, as soon as he returned to the field, had rolled up three of her networks in Europe in forty-eight hours flat was actually – _comforting_. It was something she could understand, a retreat to black-and-white morality that restored her to her rightful place.

And now they’re in Paris, and he’s definitely got a semi-concealed holster on his hip, and her gorgeous dress is specially modified to conceal at least three daggers (it can accommodate up to five, depending on how uncomfortable or flexible she wants to be on any particular evening) and there’s tequila salt on Kenobi’s cheekbone. She leans forward just enough in the dark that she can lick it off, with the very tip of her tongue, and when she pulls back Kenobi is smirking at her with that infuriating look of a man with no memory, as though the entire world has narrowed down to just this moment and nothing they’ve ever done to each other matters.

“I have a proposition for you, my dear,” he says, pleasantly, and it takes a brief but very intense moment of struggle for her not to pull away from where the tips of their fingers are tangled up together on top of the bar.

“Really,” she sniffs, tossing her nose in the air. “Whatever convinced you that you knew what _I_ could _want_ , Kenobi?”

“Oh, I know very well,” he says, quietly, and that _does_ make her angry, sending an itch prickling down her spine.

“‘Red in my ledger’?” she quotes in a hiss, and nearly laughs at the quirk upwards his eyebrows take at the reference (if he’s surprised that she knows it, she’ll make fun of him for years for _his_ knowing). “I’m not your pet project, Kenobi. I don’t want your precious fucking _redemption_.”

She’s never been so blatant about this before, she knows. Neither of them have been. Suddenly the past five years, taken as a whole, feel like some elaborate, pathetic dance of his construction, and she’s going to escape the beat right fucking _now_.

“I’m not offering a job,” he says, and then _he’s_ the one disentangling their hands and reaching carefully into an inner pocket of his blazer; he pushes a card over to her, a little white piece of stock paper on which is printed a barely-visible address. “A place. For you. A safe place.”

“Right,” she scoffs, picking up the card and twirling it in her fingers, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on him to make it clear she’s not going to fucking look at it. “With a SWAT team in the bathroom and bugs in every wall.”

“It’s clean. It’s yours if you want it.”

She pauses.

She’s memorized the address already. It had only taken a glance.

Ventress smirks as hard as she can manage, keeping her eyes narrowed, amused. “Well, you can keep it,” she says casually, reaching forward to tuck it back into his jacket. “But I will admit – you do know how to tempt a girl.”

His shrug is elegant, not a hint of stiffness around the shoulder she had so cruelly damaged, and his poker face is very firmly in place. He could run Las Vegas if he were so inclined. “Suit yourself.”

Kenobi drapes his blazer around her shoulders as they leave (she was right about the holster, though it stays pretty well hidden under the edge of his waistcoat); it is cool outside as they walk down the Rue de Rivoli and turn north, avoiding tourists wherever possible.

They will always end up here. They always have. This sort of place – in Paris, it’s Strasbourg, with the majestic Saint-Denis arch towering into the sky, where hashish smoke fills the air and prostitutes lounge on pavements at twenty-foot intervals, and they find that doorway they always find, that small, dark alleyway, where they can screw each other into oblivion against a patch of brick wall. A tree in Central Park; an out-of-order phone box in Knightsbridge, the back of a tea-shop in Marrakech, the top of a skyscraper in Tokyo, it’s always the same – always the zipper of her dress pressing into her spine, always her reaching down and scratching her nails into him as his fingers dig bruises into her thighs, hiking up fabric, hissing into her ear as she wraps herself around him and pushes him inside.

Gods, but it’s always so good. And Ventress knows she’s lying to herself every time she tells herself she’s going to stop.

( _Sadist_ , he’d growled once, when she’d drawn blood from his lower lip and pulled out strands of copper hair from his scalp before any buttons had been undone. _Masochist_ , she’d slithered back, and he’d shivered hard and melted like putty under the hand forced into his waistband, and she’d grabbed hold of that moment and fucked _him_ , instead, and watched at a distance, laughing like a hyena, as he couldn’t sit down for a week.)

She’s drawn blood this time, too, from the corner of his mouth, and she licks it away slowly as she comes down from her high, shuddering, scraping long nails across his scalp. She’s always loved the way he goes boneless and breathless, nosing absent-mindedly at her cheek as though he’s completely forgotten who he’s with and how close he is to death.

One of these days, she’ll end it, and him. And she knows he knows this, too. But tonight – no, not tonight.

It’s easy, as it always is, to step away from him; to slide his jacket off of her shoulders, ball it up, toss it casually into his face and watch it fall into his nerveless hands. “Always a pleasure,” she purrs.

“Likewise,” he sighs, and when she last looks back he is straightening his cuffs, running fingers through his hair so it instantly lies just so.

Ventress walks. She walks, and she thinks about the little card with that address near the Châtelet; she stops in another hotel bar, knowing she looks just as perfect as she did before she was picked up and fucked senseless against the wall of a brothel, and thinks some more.

At two a.m., she pays her tab and walks directly to the address she’s only seen once, taking no shortcuts or backtrails, stepping proudly, catching sight of her reflection in every store and restaurant window and glorying in it. She looks like a flame, an immortal torch, as she finally arrives at the handsome Haussmann-style doorway, picks the lock, and steps inside to find a tiled art-deco foyer, soft yellow lighting, an iron-railinged staircase spiraling up into the dark.

There are quiet voices above; she stops, mind racing, and conceals herself quickly, slipping into the shadows beneath the flight of stairs; and then Kenobi is coming down those same stairs, slowly, a small, wizened figure leaning heavily on his supporting arm.

“Failed again, you have?”

“In this case I prefer to see each failure as a certain type of progress, sir,” Kenobi says smoothly, and Ventress presses two fingers to her lips to stop herself from cursing every Jedi’s existence to deepest hell and back. Fucking _Yoda_. It’s fucking Director _Yoda, here_ , and she’d been inches away from giving herself up to him, and –

The twinge of regret, of potential betrayed, that shocks through her makes her left knee tremble, nearly enough that she staggers.

“Hmm,” Yoda says, his cane tapping each step slowly, steadily. “Feelings for this woman, you have kindled.”

“Not kindled,” Kenobi says, softly. “‘Discovered’ might be the more appropriate term.”

“Ever you have collected these hurts,” Yoda says cryptically, as they reach the foyer and the streetlight shines on his bald, wrinkled pate. “Examine, you should, whether they are worth the effort you give them.”

“I understand.”

“See that you do, you will.” Yoda means it to be a rebuke, Ventress is sure, but the effect is rather spoiled by the creased smile that somehow finds its way out of his ruined face. “Until next we meet, Mr. Kenobi.”

“Sir,” Kenobi nods, and, taking Yoda’s arm again, he helps the ancient spy out to the curb, where a suspiciously non-descript car is waiting; in its wake, Kenobi just stands there, a brief summer wind ruffling his hair and blowing out his tie in furls and banners, before he turns and, his hands in his pockets, walks back towards the Seine.

Ventress lets out a long breath, and waits the requisite five minutes before she dares slip from her hiding place, her lips curling back. Gods, give her a match and some lighter fluid. Give her five seconds and a sledgehammer, and she’ll fucking tear this building down brick by brick –

– she’s up the stairs before she can stop her curiosity, finding an unlocked door and beyond – a little slice of paradise. Huge iron-wrought windows, moonlight spilling across hardwood floors. High ceilings in which little plaster curlicues wrap themselves around faces of cherubs; in the distance, the Tour St. Jacques, lit from all sides, still casting shadows; throws and blankets in a red so deep it is almost purple cover the wide bed. When she eases herself down upon it and lays back, her reflection scatters around the room through the million angles of a chandelier, pale gold even in the dark.

There is a scrap of paper under one of the pillows: _All yours, my dear_ , it says, in a neat, flourishing italic, the heavy black ink barely dry.

“Bastard,” she whispers, and sinks into the sheets with a moan of pleasure, and it’s as if the dress has slid crumpled up her legs on purpose, her hand sliding so smoothly across the flat planes of her stomach as she traces the memory, three years old now, of beard-bristle on her thighs.

She sighs, and sinks deeper, and thinks that – maybe, just maybe, when it comes to running away –

This time, she’ll sleep on it.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edmund Spenser's _Amoretti,_ Sonnet 49:
> 
> FAyre cruell, why are ye so fierce and cruell?  
> Is it because your eyes haue powre to kill?  
> then know, that mercy is the mighties iewell,  
> and greater glory thinke to saue, then spill.  
> But if it be your pleasure and proud will,  
> to shew the powre of your imperious eyes:  
> then not on him that neuer thought you ill,  
> but bend your force against your enemyes.  
> Let them feele th'utmost of your crueltyes,  
> and kill, with looks as Cockatrices doo:  
> but him that at your footstoole humbled lies,  
> with mercifull regard, giue mercy too.  
> Such mercy shal you make admyred to be,  
> so shall you liue by giuing life to me.


	2. I - San Francisco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This bug bit and it bit hard. Welcome to the new-improved-and-expanded world of VentrObi spies!

*

Ventress accepts the challenge of carrying out a hit on a Jedi when she is in New York, laying low after having taken care of a bit of business involving a mob boss who was too in debt for either his own good or that of his customers. The body hasn’t been found yet, and she’s guessing it’ll take at least a week before any evidence is found – she had stuffed him down a _very_ deep, unused drain, after all – so she’s more than happy to take advantage of the brutal winter that has descended on the City and hole up in the Village until she gets her next Call.

It comes when she’s sitting on her fire escape in the snow, willing her skin to turn translucent. Dooku sounds angry on the end of the line; she puts him on speaker so she doesn’t need to hear his low, cultured growl too near her ear.

San Francisco, he says. Tomorrow. “A step up for you, my dear. We have a very important job for you.”

She’s wanted to kill a Jedi for years – ever since she’d learned of their existence, ever since she’d connected certain dots and realized that she finally, after too long a time searching, had a name to put to the object of her revenge. They come from everywhere, and nowhere – plucking their prizes from the depths of the most secret, most highly-trained special forces around the world, someone, somehow, has managed to build themselves a vigilante do-gooder service for hire, its agents sent around the globe to stop the likes of her from doing the work she does.

Asajj Ventress doesn’t like her territory being impinged upon; she certain doesn’t appreciate, either aesthetically or morally, the idea that hits that could be done for cash are done for free, suddenly, terrifyingly, from somewhere besides the acknowledged underworld.

She wants her kills to _know_ she’s coming. It’s so much more fun that way. And more dangerous, but that’s by the by. She has no thought of what End lies in store for her. There is only the hunt, and for once, she’s being offered the chance to have it mean something.

The hotel room that has been provided for her has a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and – as ever, given Dooku’s meticulous and moneyed demands – has already been swept for bugs and provided with a veritable arsenal of weapons inside the converted minibar. She has decided to play it as a fashionably-frightening businesswoman out on the town – completely opaque sunglasses, a skintight croptop underneath her tailored blazer, sky-high shoes with real stilettos in the heels. The only padding she allows on her angular frame is that which will hide the two loaded guns that will fill out the center of her back.

It’s easy enough to find them. They are apparently on leave – how and when Dooku obtained this information she cannot guess – but they haven’t bothered to disguise themselves a jot from the pictures she was provided with. One swaggering brunette, one neatly-pressed redhead. Both move with the easy grace of those immensely aware of their surroundings, and their bodies; former Army Rangers, their files had said. Habits die hard – they have only consumed half of their first drinks, and she doubts they will order more.

The brunette catches sight of her as she pushes her sunglasses up to the top of her head, the better to see in the dark, pulsing bar. He says something to the redhead. The crowd swallows them up.

Ventress shrugs to herself, and slides off her barstool; it’s easy enough to find her way to the back door of the bar, which opens itself out into a steamy alleyway, where the redhead is talking into thin air.

“Yes, sir,” he says, and Ventress grins, sharp and hungry. Her favored ploy has always been to flush out her prey by blatantly exposing herself; more often than not, the hastily-arranged plans that must be put into place to engage her reveal a weakness she can exploit. “Yes. Anakin is checking the surrounding area. Kenobi out.”

He touches a finger to the side of his head, presumably to silence an earpiece; then he puts his hands in his pockets, and just stands there, straight-backed and calm.

“Hello,” he says. She can hear his smirk. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

He tilts his head at the sound of the safety snapping off of her gun, but otherwise does not move. “Turn around,” she menaces, and finally, he does – he has a pleasant face, bearded, a genuine curiosity in his eyes.

“Hm,” he says, eyebrows rising slightly. “Most commendable.”

Ventress doesn’t have any interest in finding out whether he’s talking about her looks or something else, but she’ll easily admit that she hadn’t been expecting this. _Hells, he isn’t even **armed** , _she thinks, her eyes skipping quickly over all the obvious places on his person where he could hide a firearm and coming up empty.

She lowers her gun; she sashays forward a few steps, and finds herself smugly gratified by the look of appreciation which is definitely now lurking in his features. “Alright,” she says sweetly, not letting her feral grin reach her eyes, just to let him know where the power in this alleyway lies. “I’ll bite. What is this?”

“A fact-finding mission,” he says simply, shrugging. She has no reason to doubt him – not based on his tone, at any rate. “We’ve been curious. Such – ferocious work,” he continues, more quietly, and now she can see the strength in him, the idiotic moral fibre coiling in his core. “So powerfully executed.”

“Like it, do you?” she snickers, and –

Oh.

Oh, he _does_.

Well. _That_ changes everything.

She moves quickly, forces her way into his space, slams them both into the brick wall with her gun pressed up into his chin. He’s fast, too – he may not have been hiding a gun, but he’s got an arm like iron around her waist, and there’s the sharp point of something pressed lightly into her side, threatening disemboweling or worse.

“Shall I show you what I can do to you?” Ventress whispers. She leans further forward, puts her open mouth at the corner of his, smiles as she leaves hot breath on his cheek.

“I’m not sure I’d find it pleasant,” he says, eyes boring down into hers. The knife hasn’t moved a millimeter against her skin; admirable control, and oh, how she wants to break it, right here and now.

“Oh, I’m sure I could make it pleasant for the both of us, darling,” she purrs.

He laughs, a rich, giggly sort of sound, and then there’s movement at the end of the alleyway, and a shouted curse.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” he says, and sounds like he actually means it, his eyes contracting with concern – though why he’s contemplating feeling sorry for her when it would only take her an instant to die baffles her.

And anyway, it isn’t to be. Ventress forces his head up with the gun barrel, hears his skull crack against the wall, and hurls herself backwards just centimetres from where his dagger would have been as it sweeps across him; she turns, runs, fires back over her shoulder without looking, hears bullets pinging off of fire escapes and trash cans, forcing the other Jedi agent to take cover. She melts into the crowd outside the bar with no effort whatsoever.

 _How very interesting_ , she thinks, incandescent with something which she really hopes is unadulterated rage, and not curiosity, or lust, or anything else even more disturbing (and distracting) as she stalks down the nearest hill, flipping her sunglasses back on to deal with the glare of streetlamps.

Revenge, it seems, has just gotten complicated.

*

**TBC**

*


	3. II - Moscow

*

Asajj is in Buenos Aires, contracted to kill a far-too-idealistic politician, when she returns to her safe house one night to find a light on in her cubbyhole kitchen and a scrap of paper on the counter.

 _Five minutes, my dear,_ it says, politely. Three minutes later, from a darkened doorway halfway down the street, she watches the first SWAT teams take up their positions; they go in with flash grenades and fully automatic rifles blazing, and she bites her lip so hard she draws blood. She barely gets out of the country, using the backup passport of a backup of a backup, and finds that the level of international chit-chat following her means she must stay entirely hidden for a further three weeks.

She orders a lot of takeout, sneers at the puerile filth that she always does on the television, and plots all sorts of imaginative revenges.

It takes her a frustrated week of that first exile, trawling through the purloined data sets Dooku had provided her with when she’d first entered his employ and periodically updated since, to discover that hardly anyone knows anything at all about her new nemesis. He has multiple aliases, though the one he seems to favor is that of Ben Kenobi, a mild-mannered Foreign Service office boy who hops from one sterile-apartmented posting to another around the globe. Officially, he’s been sent to Namibia, Kazakhstan, Australia, Panama, and (briefly) Hawaii; officially, he’s British, and his accent would seem to bear that out, though of course Asajj knows full well that any physical or outward sign of nationality or belonging is breathtakingly easy to fake.

 _Un_ officially, he’s been a Jedi for ten years, and has been largely responsible for training at least two others. Unofficially, he’s quietly risen to become the most efficient, if never the most spectacular, agent they’ve ever had.

Unofficially, he lays far more traps than he ever kills. One coded internal memo, hacked from wherever the Jedi keep their servers (that must have been a job and a half), refers to him as the Negotiator.

Asajj raises an eyebrow at this, not sure whether to scoff or take careful note of something that could be turned to her advantage. She files it away in the back of her mind, and keeps reading.

When it’s finally safe enough for Dooku to contact her, she’s sent to New Delhi, and there, in sweltering heat and a clinging sari, she stalks right into the middle of a drug baron’s warehouse meeting and, ignoring the looks of confounded rage staring at her from the sorting table, looks up into the rafters and screeches “ _Jedi!_ ”

She whips round and starts running as all hell breaks loose; a bullet catches her Kevlar vest, up close to her shoulder, but she doesn’t break stride. The drug men (mostly) escape; the Jedi agents who flood the building are effing and blinding and shouting at Kenobi that “ _I thought you took care of that bitch,_ ” which makes Asajj, standing and watching as she is from a dark corner, standing over the body of a less fortunate Jedi that she has just brained with a machete, grin like a banshee.

Kenobi doesn’t look angry, in the half-light. Nettled, to be sure, but as he holsters his gun and leans over to grab and inspect a sheaf of bills from under the remnants of the one gangster they did manage to kill, it’s more as if – it’s more as if he’s just waiting, expecting.

Asajj is happy to oblige. She sits in an internet café, covers her face against the rotten, pervasive smell of incense, and types out an email – she addresses it to [ben.kenobi@jedi.com](mailto:ben.kenobi@jedi.com), and knows that even when that address doesn’t exist, the message will get to him.

 _Your move, darling_ , she writes, and disappears into the night.

In Houston, two weeks later, Kenobi himself is sitting in a car outside the apartment she normally uses when she arrives, his windows open and sixties pop leaking out into the humid air. Catching sight of her, he tips down his sunglasses and grins out at her standing there with her duffel bag and thunderous frown.

“Heading my way?” he asks.

Asajj lets out a wordless growl and turns away, stomping through the midday lunch crowd. She can hear him _fucking_ laughing, ‘The Loco-motion’ slowly becoming more distant as he drives away.

She has to give up the job she was slated for, and Dooku ignores her for a month.

It’s winter again by the time she’s in Moscow, and she’s been feeling a lot better about things recently – five quick jobs, and five quick kills, have put her back in her employer’s good graces and refilled her many bank accounts to her satisfaction. She still can’t shake the itching feeling that she’s been _allowed_ to get away with them, though – they were consolidation jobs, taking out smaller heavies so the big hitters could remain undisturbed, and she has a suspicion that Kenobi (for he’s surely been following her, he’s surely been assigned to her as surely as she plans to devote herself to him) doesn’t care that she’s taken out men who probably didn’t deserve to live anyway – if you planned on looking at the world through his eyes, that is. She doesn’t give much of a fuck who they are or what they had coming.

But now, in Moscow, she’s ready to admit to herself that she’s tired, and that this newest job has her more than a little on edge. She’s supposed to engineer a gang war, encourage the downfall of no less than three family heads by having them tear each other apart – but after a week of reconnaissance, she’s fairly sure that if she adds any more tinder to the smoldering fire that these hulking murderers have already built she’s unlikely to escape the resulting crossfire alive.

She’s in one of the bosses’ favored nightclubs, where he rules like a king, his massive bulk attended to by pouting women and neanderthalish men with a seemingly endless supply of vodka, when she spots Kenobi sidling towards her through the crowd, flashing blue and green lights making him pass in and out of her vision.

“Another for the lady,” he says to the bartender in flawless Russian, and takes her own glass out of her hand. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

Asajj looks down into the swirling cocktail, which Kenobi shoves off down the bar, and sneers. “Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

“It would be the correct thing to do, I suppose,” he shrugs. He’s ludicrously overdressed for a chrome-plated disco dump like this one, but Asajj leers appreciatively at his trim waist nonetheless, briefly intrigued by the tattoo whose edge is visible at the top of his rolled-up sleeves. “But I would never insult you by calling _you_ correct, my dear.”

She pulls his tie free from his waistcoat, wraps it around her hand. By the time they’re on the dancefloor, there’s so little space to move that they end up plastered against each other in any case; still, the way his pupils flare at her brief tug, like she is his leash, is worth it. It’s the principle of the thing.

It’s ironic, really, she thinks gleefully, that to have a top-secret conversation about murder and death they have to shout to be heard, and that it’s been so fucking _easy_ to get him right where she wants him (specifically, with their thighs touching from pelvis to knee and their chins practically on each other’s shoulders; he’s as graceful here as everywhere else, and it makes her want to savor every sinful second).

“Why are you here?”

“The same reason as you, I suspect. The Hutt families have been on our radar for a long time.”

“And what do you plan on doing about it?”

“I rather think I should ask _you_ that question,” he bellows back. She turns around in his arms, rolls her hips backwards against him.

“I think I’m getting the fuck out of town,” she says, her mouth close to his ear. He’s got both hands on her waist; somewhat to her surprise, he merely hums thoughtfully; and then, too soon, before she’s learned exactly how their bodies mold together, he runs a hand down one of her arms and steps back.

“Do you know – I rather think I agree. Completely,” he says, eyes twinkling. “Draw?”

She grins nastily. “Draw. This time.”

“Until next time,” he nods, and, not breaking her gaze, lifts one of her hands to press a lingering kiss to her knuckles.

The Hutt family wars start a week later, without either Asajj or Kenobi having made a move, and she is indeed glad, given the reports of gruesome torture and execution-style killings which suddenly proliferate all over Moscow and St. Petersburg, that she has sat this one out.

 _Well done_ , says a note she finds in her safe house one day; she stays away from it for hours, but no police force comes knocking.

The Negotiator, it seems, has earned his reputation.

*

**TBC**

*


	4. III - London

*

She dreams of dominating him.

That isn’t so strange, in and of itself. When she does have dreams, they’re usually variants on a theme – acts of violence without any fear of recrimination, slow and tortuous acts of revenge. Ventress wants to beat Kenobi; she wants to punish him as the ultimate exemplar of everything he stands for. That the fool seems so open to being pushed to his limits before he’ll snap and kill her merely fuels the flames of her imagining just what she’ll be able to get away with, and fuck, but her subconscious _runs_ with it.

He’d look so pretty at her mercy – panting her name, begging, maybe bleeding. That she knows she’s unlikely to ever see this fantasy in the flesh (because she doubts that he’d be _that_ much of a pushover even if the circumstances were right) doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

When Asajj wakes up from dreams such as these, it’s always with a prickle of disgusted annoyance at herself, and at him – thankfully it only takes a moment, when she’s suiting up for a day’s work, to take comfort in the heft of a knife’s hilt in her hand and remember that priority no. 1 is separating his pretty head from his pretty, pretty neck.

She’s in London, at the moment, and has been planning her latest assassination for weeks. It’s meant to be subtly devastating – a second Litvinenko, Dooku had chuckled, when he’d told her to use poison. England has always crawled with exiled dissidents of all kinds, and she’s got a vial of diluted cyanide reserved for one who’s on the run from a country where it would be _most_ convenient for one of Dooku’s highly-placed allies if this thorn in their side were to be removed. She cases the restaurant where said dissident meets his potential backers and asylum advisers, in bustling Soho; she makes friends with the chef, who is so in awe of her that she doesn’t even need to fuck him to get the access she needs.

It’s an entirely ordinary Tuesday evening when she shows up at the door – dressed to the nines in a minidress that’s meant to confuse and impress – palms the vial in her hand, and, setting her sights on her target’s water glass, makes her move.

She’s within two feet of the table when she’s bumped into, hard, and the vial jolts from her hand, smashing across the floor.

“Oh, _madame_ ,” says a falsely-panicked, all-too-familiar voice, accented French (dramatic _bastard_ ); a hand with a grip like a vise clamps around her wrist. “I _do_ apologize – please, let me – ”

She grins ingratiatingly; she lets Kenobi, flustered and blustering, lead her towards the restrooms, every single one of her muscles trembling with the effort not to just pull out her gun and shoot him to death right there, CCTV and her own life be fucking _damned_.

It’s a simple detour from the corridor behind the kitchens to the delivery-access alleyway behind; she punches him so hard she sees blood fly from his nose, and by the time he rocks back and stares at her he’s licking it from his upper lip.

“Right,” he says, eyes glittering and hard, and then they’ve both got six-inch Gerber daggers in their hands, and the duel begins in earnest.

Damn, but he’s good. They’re so evenly matched that she can’t find any opening, and his mouth is set in a grim line as he blocks her attacks; his blade comes to within an inch of her sternum before withdrawing, since she’s perfectly calculated his reach. It’s only going to end if one of them, or both, does something stupid – and so she does, and there they are again, with his arm wrapped around her neck from behind and her knife, twisted around her thin waist, centimeters from disemboweling him.

They stay that way for some time, their breath echoing harshly against the alley walls, trying to out-sense each other, waiting for some muscle to slacken or for her airway to constrict too much or his grip to slip. None of that happens.

Ventress bares her teeth, letting out as loud a growl as she dares. “Draw?” she forces out, the word like acid on her tongue.

“Perhaps,” he says, though he doesn’t seem to believe it. “I won’t let you do this again.”

“What,” she scoffs, and just like that, the agreement seems settled, as she springs away from him and he lets her go, just far enough that they have room to look at each other full-length. “Nearly kill you, or nearly kill your detail?”

“Both,” he says; he pulls a handkerchief from a pocket in his jacket, wipes the blood off of his face. “You _know_ that, Asajj.”

“Shut up,” she snarls. She whirls on her heel, sliding her folding knife back into her jacket pocket as she storms away. _This has gotten out of hand_ , she thinks, telling herself that from now on, she’s going to keep her fucking distance from the man. There _must_ be jobs she can do that he won’t care about; there must be a way to kill him from a distance, to find a chink in the anti-sniper training he’s no doubt had drilled into him for years.

She’ll kill him, and she’ll be glad of it, and that will be that.

It takes several minutes, in her fury, to realize that she’s being followed. She takes a more meandering path, which makes no difference to throwing him off; Soho is relatively quiet late on a Tuesday night, though, so when she stalks down one of the infinite small, pedestrianized streets where you can nearly stretch out your arms and touch buildings on either side, she is alone but for an out-of-service telephone box and the careful, measured footsteps behind her.

Ventress rolls her eyes, turns on a dime, and stops Kenobi in his tracks.

“ _What?_ ” she hisses, or tries to – the word dies on her lips as Kenobi stands there with his hands in his pockets, and drops of dried blood on his collar, and looks his fill of her in the weak moonlight.

“Right,” she says, echoing him, and grins, sharply.

Time for her to start quite another sort of fight.

She grabs his hand, pulls them both into the telephone box, hides them both in shadows. He tastes like blood when she jerks him down to kiss him, tearing at his lips, snickering as he groans and shoves up against her, his hands raking her skin-tight dress up her thighs.

“Naughty girl,” he whispers, as his fingers find nothing underneath, and she hikes a leg around him, winds a hand into his hair and pulls back so she can get at his throat. If she chose to bite hard enough, she knows – _he_ knows – he could be dead in moments, and it’s turning him on so fast that he shudders against her the moment she gets her other hand under his belt and tugs.

She likes him disheveled, she thinks, deliriously, as, finally, he pulls her flush against him and fucks up into her, shoving them both into a corner of the godforsaken phonebox, quick and hard and demanding. Gods, she fucking _loves_ this. He’s coming apart inside her, with her teeth around his collarbone, her tongue doing some fucking of its own against his. Just as she’s read him like an open book – his head tilts whatever direction she pulls it, and her grip is cruel – he seems to know exactly how to please her, taking no prisoners, his fingers digging bruises.

Ventress latches onto his neck like a vampire, meets each of his thrusts with her own, and she digs her nails into his half-bared shoulders so hard when she comes that she can’t quite tell if his own release is a moan of pleasure or pain.

It’s quiet for a moment, as he struggles for breath; she feels sated and pulsing with it, predatory, sultry. She snickers, then, taking an ear firmly between her teeth and gently tugging.

“Dear oh dear,” she says lazily. “What _would_ your bosses say?”

“That I’m a damned fool,” Kenobi sighs, though he doesn’t sound unhappy about it at all. He presses two kisses to her neck, soft and absent-minded, and pulls back to look at her – he is recovering some of his smarm, and raises an eyebrow at her. “What now, my dear?”

It is a stupid question – a surprising one, too, coming from him. Perhaps he really is an idiot after all. “I don’t know,” she drawls, half-truthfully. He groans as she slips off of him; it is but the work of a moment to tug her dress back into its former perfection, and he is not far behind (though he has quite a bit more work to do to be presentable). “What is it you said – ‘until next time’?”

“Ah,” he says, and there is a glint in his eyes which tells Ventress he has taken her meaning perfectly, and has no objection at all. “Very well, then.”

She leans back into the phonebox from the door, grabs his tie again, pulls it up so he’s forced to lift his chin – ravages his mouth, sucks out his lower lip between her teeth, bites just hard enough that he’ll feel the prick of blood rushing to the surface of his skin.

“Catch me if you can,” she whispers, and runs.

*

**TBC**

*


	5. IV - Chicago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNINGS for this chapter:** mentions of character death, torture.

*

Skywalker, the little bitch, catches her during a job in Tokyo with a blow of stunning power to her head that leaves her vision sparking in bright colors whenever she opens her eyes more than a millimeter. Within a day, she’s at an unknown location and in a mockery of an interrogation room, where everything is either black or white, the lights don’t dim, and she’s left sitting with her hands cuffed to the tabletop for ages as if they think depriving her of food, water, and sleep is going to harm her.

It’s so fucking _boring_.

Ventress keeps track of the hours with training born of long patience and frustration. Though she can see nothing of the outside world besides a dark corridor when the door finally opens and Kenobi walks in, she knows it’s four a.m. based on her pervious time zone, and she has been awake for a day and a half.

“Hello, Asajj,” he says quietly, and, closing the door firmly behind him – she can hear locks clicking into place, one, two, three – he sits across from her at the table, pushing a bottle of water into her hands. “Drink it. All of it.”

She squints at him suspiciously. “Why?”

He huffs, with genuine annoyance. “So you don’t dehydrate and pass out, you – ” He pauses. Then he reaches forward, screws off the cap himself, and takes a sip of it before handing it back to her. “There. It’s safe. Now drink.”

She does, slowly, just to spite him. He waits until she’s finished, arms folded neatly across his chest.

“You’ve put me in a rather difficult position, my dear,” he begins.

She snorts. She can’t help it – she laughs outright, cackling into the cool tabletop. “ _You’re_ in a bad position? How fucking _sad_ for you.”

“Asajj –”

“Don’t _call_ me that,” she hisses, lunging towards him as far as she dares – he just sits there, not moving a muscle.

The last time he’d said her name like that was when he’d been chasing her at sunset through a park in Singapore, two weeks before – damn, was it only two weeks? Something about remembering it makes her throat run dry again.

Anyway, Skywalker has ruined everything, now, and if she escapes – _when_ she escapes – Dooku will most likely kill her for being compromised, and it won’t be a quick death. So Kenobi can take his sanctimonious worry for his reputation and shove it up his tight little ass for all she gives a fuck about him anymore.

“Do you have anyone to protect you from Dooku?” he asks, abruptly. “Or are you alone?”

She stares, dumbly. “What sort of a question is that?” she croaks, eventually, rallying the shreds of her dignity around her. “I thought you Jedi knew everything.”

“Not everything,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “No contacts? No-one who owes you a favor? A mentor, a – ”

She lunges for him again, and this time she manages to lay hands on his lapels before he pulls away – behind the observation glass on one side of the room, she fancies she hears a hurried sound as his backup comes to attention.

“Shut _up_ ,” she snarls. “You keep me in here, I’m dead. You let me go, I’m dead. Simple enough for you?”

“So, a mentor, then,” he says calmly, folding his arms again.

Asajj sits, heavily. They stay that way, in silence, for some time. She’s forgotten to keep counting her minutes.

“The man who trained me died in Pakistan, eight years ago,” Kenobi says. When she lifts her eyes, she sees he’s sitting upright and tense, though his voice is as unruffled as ever. “They threw his head down a well.”

She waits. He waits. Eventually, she realizes what he’s done.

“Tit-for-tat, Kenobi?” she says lowly, a laugh bubbling up in her throat. It hurts. “You think I care about your little sob story?”

He says nothing.

Asajj slumps back in her seat. “I think my mentor was a Jedi,” she says. That has startled him; he leans towards her, quickly, and then stops himself, just waiting. “I don’t know who killed him. But I know he was running from everyone, at the end.”

She tilts forward, and smiles. Her anger makes her strong. “If I ever find out the Jedi were responsible,” she whispers, feeling her tongue slither in her mouth, “I will cut off that pretty dick of yours and choke you to death with it.”

He lowers his eyes, considering. “Fair enough,” he mutters, surprising her.

And then he gets up, pulls a set of keys from his pocket, and unlocks her cuffs. He’s halfway out of the room before she picks her sore wrists up from the tabletop, utterly confused.

“You’re free to go,” he says shortly, hauling open the door. “Good luck with Dooku.”

“My god,” she breathes, and giggles. “How many favors have you had to trade in for me?”

“Many.” He looks at her, and the corner of his mouth quirks. “Goodbye, Asajj.”

She lingers in the hallway for just long enough, wobbling on her cramped legs, to hear Kenobi chewing out Skywalker, which she dearly wishes she could do herself (“What the _actual fucking hell –_ ” “I did _not_ give you permission to do this, Anakin! You’ve dumped her in an _oceanful_ of shit – ”); when she staggers out into the world again it is early morning, and it turns out she’s in Chicago.

She starts walking. Five minutes later, a black car pulls up beside her.

“Get in,” Dooku intones.

By the time he’s through with her and has been convinced – oddly, because she hadn’t anticipated ever managing to do so – that she hasn’t given up any information of note, one of his henchmen has carved delicate, deep cuts into her cheeks, splitting them open from the corners of her mouth to her chin on both sides. It hurts like fuck, and the temporary destruction of her looks hurts even more.

She stays inside for two weeks, taking very thorough care of herself. The cuts fade into pale red scars; when they turn white, no one will know they’re there but herself.

She barely sleeps.

Kenobi comes to her flat twelve days after she is released; Ventress can see him on the monitor she’s had installed to watch the front door of her anonymous apartment complex. He’s alone but for a bottle of wine in his left hand, which he has raised, jovially, when she opens her door.

“Thought we could celebrate your still being among the living,” he says, and then his guilty smile drops off his face, and there is a quiet, smoldering, incandescent rage in his eyes. Her chin is in his hand before she can say a word.

“Dooku?” he asks. She tells herself not to shiver.

“What do _you_ think?” she says snidely, grabbing the bottle. She tugs her face out of his palm, turns, walks away from him, refusing to be examined like some sort of farm animal. The scars ache and sting; she has barely spoken since it happened, and her cheeks protest against being stretched, against speech itself.

Kenobi watches her in silence for a moment; then he turns back to the door, puts two fingers on the handle.

“I would have you know,” he murmurs, “that I would kill him for that alone. Never –” He stops, and takes a long breath. “Never doubt that, Asajj.”

He leaves her alone, and she wants, strangely, to weep.

*

**TBC**

*


	6. V - New York

*

She manages to avoid him for six months. By the time they meet again, Ventress has practically forgotten she was ever hurt.

It’s in New York again, that second time, when they meet as if by accident on the northwest corner of Central Park – his fault, definitely, because she hadn’t been planning on letting him back into her life so soon. But she has a mark, and he must be on it, because the easy smile on his face tells her instantly that she won’t be getting her money’s worth this time.

So they walk into the Park together as the sun sets, and she lets him fold them both down into a pile of bright, scattered autumn leaves – and then he lets her roll them over and ride him until they’re both nearly screaming with it.

“They’ll kill us,” she says wickedly, leaving lingering, sucking marks along his neck.

“Let them try,” he says drowsily, and, without even opening his eyes, carefully plucks her hand off of the butt of his gun.

She sits upright, frowning; he moans quietly, as nerve-endings spasm through their last stimulation. “I don’t owe you anything, Kenobi,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. “You _do_ know that.”

“I would never _demand_ anything of you, my dear,” he drawls in reply, and gently rolls her off of him, sitting with one arm looped around a knee as he looks affectionately down at her curled up in the leaves, running his other hand briefly along her ribs. “I can but ask.”

Ventress thinks about that for a long time, once she’s alone again and has hared off to do a job in Poland which, it seems, the Jedi have no interest in. When she finally decides that fuck it, she _does_ owe him, and even if he never decides to collect she’ll be paying him back regardless, it makes a headache spark madly at her temples.

 _Fucking_ Jedi.

Said fucking Jedi are in trouble, she hears a month later from a more-than-usually smug Dooku. He’s got them running ragged around the globe with his own plots while they are already stretched thin with the work they’ve accepted from governments, rich Concerned Citizens, and gods know what else – Kenobi hasn’t followed her or contacted her for weeks, and, strangely, that makes her uneasy.

Ventress goes back to New York; she does her own detective work, finds out where Kenobi squats when he’s here – an anonymous housing project in Alphabet City, as it turns out – and waits for him.

She waits for a week, and sees nothing, and finally snarls, gets out of her car, and stalks into the nearest coffeeshop with free wifi to run through her usual round of police scanners and internet rumor. It’s only then that the pieces start to fall into place – the NYPD are moving in on a crime family, she discovers from the woefully-encoded radio chatter; but the mobsters have gone to ground and armored up, and so the police have called in uneasy backup.

She checks her more intimate circles for news. Skywalker is in New Zealand. Tano, his eager-beaver little helper, seems to be in Tunisia.

If Kenobi’s on his own, here, he’s in _serious_ fucking trouble.

And so it proves. She stalks around the neighborhood where the mob heavies have apparently melted into the crowds – it’s blatant, right in Midtown, with tourists and residents swarming the nearby Bryant Park – and spots Kenobi almost immediately. He’s not hard to spot, she thinks, nearly fondly, with his hair shining copper in the slanted sun and his hipster-come-good tailored chic.

It’s also not hard to see that he’s being tailed. By four – no, seven, shit – men who clearly only have one thing in mind.

Ventress ducks into a nearby store, watches one of the men tap Kenobi on the shoulder. He looks around him; smiles, the _idiot_ – and though they do not touch him, it’s more than clear that he has no choice when one of them gestures to a two-dollar pizzeria on the corner of 40 th Street, and he walks inside in the midst of them, for all the world like he’s being invited to lunch.

Asajj swears under her breath; she pulls out a phone, one of her burners, one which she can discard after sending a single message if necessary.

 _COME NOW_ , she types, to the non-existent, red-flag-waving address of skywalker@jedi.com. _HURRY._

She walks in a circle around the store; takes the SIM chip out of the phone, breaks it into twos, then fours, and leaves the phone inconspicuously on a shelf next to a pile of New York-themed calendars. She steps out into the street; leans down as though she’s dropped something, throws the SIM fragments into a grating in the gutter.

And then she stands up, brushes off her hands, and crosses over to get a three-dollar, two-slices-and-a-soda lunch deal.

It takes longer than she expects for the heavies to re-emerge, filing out from behind the counter. Two of them are limping. One of them doesn’t come back out again at all; another, with a single, vivid bruise rising up across half of his face, is swearing floridly into a phone in Ukrainian.

She waits for them to leave, furiously committing their features to memory, and then, when the doughboys are distracted with hungry customers, she slips quickly back to the rear of the place, tiptoeing across greasy floors until she reaches the rear exit; there is nothing beyond it but a small, chainlink-fenced, concrete yard, half-full with a closed green dumpster and several other boxes and bags of fetid trash.

Ventress covers her nose, briefly, and breathes deep. Suddenly, she’s not sure she wants to contemplate what she might find.

She lifts the lid of the dumpster, which squeals and groans; flies rise in a cloud, already feasting on the broken-in face of the biggest heavy, his eyes pulped and unseeing. And underneath him –

“Ventress,” Kenobi rasps. She swears, digs around the Ukrainian’s body until she has enough room to lift him out by his shirtfront – his hair is caked with blood, his eyes roll back in his head, his arm is probably broken. And then he coughs, and blood froths up on his lip, and she can feel his ribcage moving under his skin, in shattered, fractured pieces.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he groans. He’s clearly beyond the capacity to feel pain, but he’s blanched white and shocky as she brings him down onto the disgusting concrete, lays him on his side as carefully as possible so he doesn’t drown in his own fluids.

“Damnit, Kenobi,” she hisses. She puts a hand through his hair; it comes back sticky and red, her fingers glued together. “Don’t you fucking _dare_.”

“I’m afraid I don’t think that’s up to you,” he mumbles, and then he sighs, and moves his head slightly forward so his forehead is pressed to her knee. His throat is hitching with agony as he closes his eyes.

She does the only thing she can do without revealing herself – she screams like a banshee, screams until she can hear concerned, frantic voices from inside the pizzeria, and then she scales one of the chainlink fences and watches from streetside as one of the workers comes out, lets out a shout of shock and dismay, and hurries back inside to dial 9-1-1. She watches the ambulance arrive; watches as he is loaded into it, presumably still alive, and finds herself idly surprised that, with his shirt and jacket cut away from him on the gurney, he is as naked as she as ever seen him.

Skywalker, the asshole, takes two days to get back to her. _I guess I should thank you_ , he writes, to an email address as fake as his own, but which Asajj can track from anywhere. _Don’t expect it to happen again_.

“Ungrateful little prick,” she mutters nastily, and falls back on her bed in her West Village apartment, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

She is left completely alone by any tail or hindrance for three months – but perhaps for the first time, she doesn’t find her solitude and relative freedom very refreshing.

After that, it’s Edinburgh, on a gloomy, wet evening in early January, and she manages to get into a shootout with a mark who must have been forewarned of her coming, because _no one_ should be able to get a drop on her with a loaded weapon, damn it. He puts a bullet in her shoulder from behind, and when she turns to fire back – _she_ only needs the one shot to kill him – his second goes ripping and mutilating into her belly, leaving her doubled over and heaving up bile in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat.

When she hears quick footsteps, she raises her gun without thinking, snarling wordlessly – if she’s going to die like a cornered animal, she might as well play the part.

What she gets instead is Kenobi, his own weapon unholstered and pointing straight at her, aimed right between her eyes.

She closes said eyes, slumps back, presses a strong hand to her wound.

Well. She had been expecting it from the start, she supposes. At least it’ll be quick.

She hears the safety on his gun click – on?

And then it smashes across her face, and she’s unconscious so fast that she doesn’t even see sparks of color before everything turns black. Lights on, lights out.

Lights on… and she’s lying on something not-quite-soft, and fairly prickly, and she’s warm and cocooned from the waist down in what feels like cotton wool.

 _God bless the NHS_ , she thinks blearily, as she opens her eyes. Monitors are beeping around her; at the foot of her bed, a stern-looking, middle-aged nurse is scribbling things on a clipboard.

“Water,” Asajj demands, coughing out her hoarseness. It hurts, shaking her stiff shoulder and numbed stomach.

“All in good time, dearie,” the nurse sniffs. When she opens the door to go out, Ventress catches sight of a pair of legs elegantly crossed one over the other; a magazine in a lap, hands lazily turning pages.

“Damn it, Kenobi,” she whispers, and turns over a little, snuggling down under her sheet, too tired to be angry. “And I thought I’d pulled even…”

*

**TBC**

*


	7. VI - Seattle

*

The next time Ventress sees a Jedi, it’s not the one she’s learned to expect.

Skywalker finds her in a bar in Seattle, letting out a hum of respectful admiration of the cityscape that stretches out before them through the bay windows. “Ventress. A pleasure.”

She rolls her eyes at him and picks up her drink. She’s long since perfected the air of appearing nonchalant in public, even as she crosses one leg over the other so the dagger on her hip is easier to access. “Skywalker,” she yawns. “I can’t say the same.”

“False,” he says, grinning boyishly. “I have it on good authority that my mere presence _makes_ the room.”

She has no response to that. If she lets herself say anything, she thinks she might die laughing.

He’s smart enough to get down to business, at least, which she appreciates. “Look,” he says, flopping down in a barstool next to her, leaning on one of his elbows. He has a scar over his right eye; where he got it, she can’t guess, but it must have been nasty at the time. “I don’t want you thinking that we owe you anything for getting Obi-Wan out of that mob mess, okay?”

 _Obi-Wan_ , she thinks. _Not Ben_. She files this away, and returns Skywalker’s grin. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Anything else, flyboy?”

“I dunno,” he says, and now his look is more calculating; his fingers drum gently on the bartop, and it’s easy for Ventress to see the power coiling in his broad shoulders. How Kenobi had managed to train him, she cannot fathom. They are so different; Kenobi would kill with a dart in the night, Skywalker would fight back with his bare fists. “I suppose I’m trying to decide whether to trust his judgment, or whether to tell you to fuck the hell off.”

“Neither option has anything to do with me,” she says icily. “Your daddy trust issues are your own, Skywalker. And in case you haven’t noticed, _he’s_ been the one following _me._ ”

She laughs, then, sniggering into a hand. “Gods, is this about _jealousy_ , Mr. Fancypants Jedi? Because if it is, I’ll _gladly_ share tips,” she continues, running her tongue along her teeth as she leans far, far into Skywalker’s space. “What you’ve got to _do_ , see, is get him _right_ where you want him, by force if necessary – actually, he rather likes that – ”

“You need to stop talking,” Skywalker says lightly, and turns away to take a sip of his beer. Ventress does, pouting, and turns sideways to stare out the windows onto the dull, sluggy ocean again, wondering if she should play her trump card.

Yes, why not. She’s had enough of one Jedi in her life; she doesn’t need another one crashing into it.

“No,” she says, casually. “Of course, I was mistaken. It’s not about jealousy for you, Skywalker.”

“You sound strangely confident in that.”

“Oh, I am,” she says, picking idly at one of her nails. “Besides – you’re married, right?”

She doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s gone very still. She sighs, flicks a piece of imaginary dirt off of her fingertip. “Careless of you,” she says, raising her gaze to the grey, overcast sky. “To become – _attached_ in such a way.”

Ventress gets up; she pulls on her jacket, adjusts her cuffs, and then leans in close to Skywalker’s ear.

“Stay away from me,” she whispers, her hand on his tensed thigh. “Or you’ll regret it.”

She leaves him sitting there, motionless, and smirks her whole way home.

Her high only lasts for three hours – in retrospect, she will curse every Jedi’s name for the fact that she’s _never_ allowed one fucking moment to enjoy the flush of victory. Her phone rings; she picks it up without looking at the caller ID, because, of course, Dooku is never that careless. “What?”

“ _Hello, Asajj._ ”

She stops dead where she had been doing some overdue tidying in her safehouse of the week. “How did you get this number?” she grits out.

“ _Don’t be a fool. I’ve had it since before the first time I ever saw you._ ”

Nausea rushes up her throat. It explains everything – how he’s managed to track her, how he’s been chasing Dooku so relentlessly. What _isn’t_ explained is why Kenobi has never used it, _properly_ , before – but the answer comes to her instantly.

She’s small fry. He’ll listen to her every move, but never compromise his way in. He’s needed her, and he’s used her, and as soon as he has what he needs on Dooku it won’t matter anymore.

Her fingers are digging into the phone so hard that she fancies she hears the plastic start to crack and shatter. “What a surprise,” she grates. “It must be important, for you to give up this little plant you’ve had going.”

“ _It is_.”

“You have ten seconds.”

A pause. She has counted to five in her head before Kenobi speaks again.

“ _Her name is Padmé_.”

Ventress’s eyebrows shoot up. “And you’re telling me that because – ?”

“ _Because her name is immaterial,_ ” Kenobi says flatly. She’s never heard him sound quite so – cold. “ _If she is harmed – even if it isn’t by your own hand, if **any** harm comes to her – I will find you, and I will give you to Anakin. And by the time he’s finished with you, you’ll beg me for the bullet I’ll put in your head._ ”

She is speechless with outrage, for a long time. She will never, _ever_ admit to him, or even to herself, that she’s fucking petrified.

“I’d never taken you for the sentimental type, Kenobi,” she breathes, eventually.

“ _You could say they’re all I have left,_ ” he says shortly. _“Or they were._ ”

Ventress looks out of her window, at the lowering sky.

“ _Do we have an understanding?_ ”

She clears her throat; she bares her teeth. In the mirror that hangs in the foyer of her apartment, she looks deranged. “We do.”

“ _Good_.” Another pause. “ _You can destroy the phone now. Goodbye, Ventress._ ”

He hangs up before she can formulate any sort of response.

*

**TBC**

*


	8. VII - Cairo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNINGS for this chapter: torture and general High Angst.**

*

By the time she’s in Cairo, a year later, and everything starts to come crashing down, she’s been treated by Dooku to the assembly of a veritable army to be at her disposal. She directs at least two fellow assassins (or at least, former mercenaries with excellent credentials) on every continent; she travels with bodyguards, under the alias of a millionaire businesswoman who’s given up her career for the life of a hedonist. The role suits her rather well. Or at least, she’s enjoying the hell out of it.

The first hint she gets that something might go wrong in Cairo is when she hears, through her many gravepines, that the Jedi have lost two agents in a week.

The second hint is when Dooku calls her and tells her that he has intelligence of a lone Jedi working to roll up one of his networks in Egypt. He wants the miscreant dealt with, fast, and for every gangster he has on his payroll to do the same in their various locales. For the first time, the underworld bounty on each and every Jedi’s head seems to be worth it – and seems to be working.

Sometimes, Ventress feels like her life has been directed by a cruel and fatalistic god; and that sentiment is only strengthened when she receives the recon news that the agent working in Cairo has red hair and a beard, and tans easily in the brutal summer sun.

She has five men at her side when they take up positions outside the crooked little house in El-Marg. Kenobi is working over some sort of military-grade laptop when they burst in – she’s not quite fast enough to stop him from rapidly pressing a sequence of buttons which make the keyboard spark and burst open like a mangled fruit, its information instantly lost.

“Asajj,” he says carefully, eyeing her backup as he raises his hands. “It’s been a long time.”

“Get up,” she says shortly; he does, and she shoves him over to one of his men to be frisked. “Are you alone?”

“No, as it happens,” he says, though there is little defiance in it – he tilts his head towards the next room, and sighs. “Alpha, come out. This fight is for another day.”

Ventress can’t help but be impressed – the man is _enormous_ , and glowering, and hands his sawn-off shotgun away with minimum grace.

“Chloroform for that one, I think,” she says thoughtfully, and turns back to Kenobi, who has faint frown lines between his eyebrows.

“I’m a little confused,” he says lightly. “I was under the impression that the current campaign mandated instant death for the likes of me.”

“That’s what Dooku said, yes,” she says. She steps up to him, close enough that their breath intermingles. “But you know me, Kenobi,” she whispers. “I don’t play by the rules.”

She has one of her cronies knock him out, but she herself is the one who, once they are safely hidden in the warehouse Dooku keeps in Alexandria (his by virtue of judiciously-placed payments to the military), puts her heel on his shoulder, takes one of his hands in both of hers, and wrenches upwards. He jerks and shakes as the joint is forced from its socket with a horrible pop, but he doesn’t wake – it’s only later, when he’s been hanging from it for two hours, the tips of his toes only just scraping the floor, that he starts to come back to himself, and by that time the shock has set in hard.

“Stupid idiot,” she hisses. It’s taking a while for him to focus, his head lolling back, panting rapidly as his body tries to fathom what has been done to it. “What the _hell_ were you doing here _alone?_ ”

“ _Alone, alone, how do I get you alone_ ,” he mumbles, and stares hazily at the ceiling.

She swears. His anti-interrogation training is already kicking in. She steps up to him, forces his chin down so he’s looking vaguely at her.

“Give me something, Kenobi,” she says stonily. “That’s the only way you stay alive. I can give you to Dooku and claim extenuating circumstances.”

“ _Tricked by circumstances_ ,” he wheezes. “ _Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose_ – ”

Ventress kisses him, hard, wraps herself around him so she’s taking his weight. His lips move under hers; his head moves forward on his neck, his eyes sliding closed with relief.

When she can’t bear it anymore, she yanks down on the dislocated shoulder with all her strength. All his breath deserts him in a rush, and by the time she steps back his mouth has long since gone slack, and he is out again.

“Fool,” she whispers, and leaves him there, wiping her lips furiously on the back of her hand.

She has no idea what to do, and so she waits. She ends up waiting for two weeks.

Well – she’s not just waiting. She’s with him almost every hour, carefully pouring water into his mouth, lovingly licking her way across every exposed inch of him. His arm and most of the right side of his chest have turned black with bruising; she undoes each button of his sweat-soaked white shirt, kisses around their edges, bites at his nipple and listens to his moan building deep down in his gut.

It’s everything she’s ever dreamed about – if her dreams were suddenly transmuted into nightmares, because she knows this can end only one of two ways. Either he will die, here, in her presence, and she can only hope she hears him scream once before he expires (he has remained so _quiet_ so far); or, if, by some miracle, he makes it out of here, her life is forfeit either to his hand or another’s, because after this the Jedi will not let her live.

She feels empty, and, for the first time in a very long while – purposeless.

“This would be so much easier if you said you loved me,” she says once, when she is entwined around him and slowly grinding upwards, wrapping them up skin to skin. “Then I could so easily kill you for daring to say it.”

“ _Two in love can make it,_ ” he sighs. “ _Take my heart and please don’t break it._ ”

If she had the energy to be amused, she’d tease him about his terrible taste in music. Instead, it just makes her storm off and, behind a locked iron door, bite her lip until it bleeds so she will not cry.

At the end of the two weeks, the choice is made for her. She wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of gunshots; rolling out of her meagre bed and grabbing for her weapons, she runs out into the warehouse to find the bodies of three of her men sprawled out across the floor, and there, standing in front of Kenobi and reaching up for the chains, is the huge form of the black-and-blue, beaten hulk called Alpha.

She shoots. She misses. He turns and shoots back, teeth bared in a snarl above his shotgun, and she dives behind some crates for cover, shoving a new clip into her pistol.

Alpha has taken Kenobi down from the ceiling. There is a horrendous, wrenching snap – and Kenobi screams, long and hoarse and echoing. It goes on and on, like he’s unable to keep in the accumulated agony any longer, repeating itself in a series of harsh, dwindling cries.

It’s perfect. It’s so, so perfect. Ventress presses herself into a crate, puts her face in her hands, and takes a moment to just shudder out her relief.

It is settled, then, she thinks, numbly, as Alpha throws Kenobi’s limp form over his shoulders and barrels his way out, to freedom. Her path is now set.

She grins. _Bring it on_ , she whispers to herself.

_I **will** be rid of you, Kenobi. One way or another._

*

**TBC**

*


	9. VIII - Paris

*

**Insert here:[the original fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4532856/chapters/10315518)!**

*

It’s been a long six months of keeping one, or two (if she can manage it) steps ahead of Skywalker. He hunts her like some sort of avenging angel, sending Tano wherever he can’t go, so he can be in two places at once. Together they clear Ventress’s hideouts in no less than twelve cities; it’s only when summer has rolled around again and she’s spent six weeks in a disconnected hut in Bali, followed by another two in a ramshackle stone farmhouse in Gascony, that she starts to recognize that he’s been called off the scent.

And then Paris happens, and she fucks Kenobi in Strasbourg Saint-Denis, and now she’s waking up just after midday in an apartment he says is now hers, and there’s someone in the kitchen.

She stretches like a cat; peers through the door to the bedroom to make sure the front door is closed and locked, which it is; shrugs; and, deciding that surprise is, as ever, the better part of valor, stalks over to the kitchen stark naked.

Kenobi’s in running clothes, just taking a pan off of the stove. “Charming,” he drawls, looking her up and down. “I’m off for a while. Do help yourself.”

He doesn’t touch her on his way past, but there’s no denying what she knows he wants, later – and he’s definitely not just going out for a run, or he wouldn’t be taking his phone and a fairly hefty gun strapped to his lower back.

But there’s fresh coffee, and a silk bathrobe hanging over the door to the bathroom, and hell – it’s summertime in France, and the _canicule_ heatwave is the worst it’s been in fifty years, and there are rows of filthy French novels in a bookcase in the living room, dog-eared and damp. So Ventress slouches into one of the wicker chairs by the window, spreads out her feet on cool hardwood floors, and, for a few hours, allows herself to doze, longing for a breeze, without wondering what the fuck she’s gotten herself into this time.

Kenobi doesn’t come back until nearly 8pm, but it is still nowhere near dark with the solstice only a few days off. He’s sweaty and smiling, and carrying a plastic bag of cardboard boxes which smell fucking amazing, and have Ventress leaning up out of her chair for the first time in hours. “Fine French cuisine too, Kenobi?” she sniggers. “You know how to spoil a girl.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he laughs, as he dumps his burden on the kitchen counter and turns to head to the shower, leaving his sodden t-shirt in a heap on the floor behind him as he walks. “That’s from the kebab shop down the street. It goes spectacularly well with a good rosé.”

She gets up as she hears the water start running; she has no desire to get dressed, or, really, to break out of the spell the day has put on her, and so she just stands at the window and looks out over the heat-shimmering rooves – she meanders around the flat, the floor creaking under her feet, examining the framed prints on the walls (Japanese), the occasional knick-knack and plant (there is a little bonsai tree on the kitchen windowsill, carefully and lovingly pruned).

An idea steals over her that leaves her feeling sour, as though she’s been given old lemons to suck. By the time Kenobi comes out of the bathroom, steam in his wake and his wet hair plastered on his forehead, she wants to throw a right snit.

“This is _your_ place,” she says angrily.

Kenobi pauses in rubbing at his hair, and turns away, a second towel around his waist, to go back into the kitchen. “Well, yes. That’s rather the idea, since I’m giving it to you.”

“No, I mean – this is _yours_. _Actually_ yours,” Ventress seethes, arms crossed tightly on her chest. “It’s not some bolthole or hideout – you _live_ here.”

“Occasionally,” he says quietly. He’s getting two wineglasses down from a cupboard, wiping dust off of their rims. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it fucking does!”

He laughs at her, the little prick, shaking his head. “You do tend to think too hard sometimes, Asajj,” he says, like the argument is over, and she can _feel_ herself deflating, damnit. “Will you eat?”

She grabs her plate, snarls, stomps away. He’s still chuckling as he follows her out and, when she throws herself back into her chair, comes carefully up beside her, moves a small table so it’s at her side, and puts her glass of wine at her elbow before retreating.

The food is good. The wine is good. Everything about this is fucking _good_ , and it’s making her teeth itch with the effort of telling herself that she must not, cannot, accept any of it as it is being given.

Kenobi comes back a few minutes after she’s finished desultorily picking up and eating the last bits on her plate; he sits opposite her with a sigh, wineglass dangling from his hand, squinting into the sun. It’s still unbearably hot, and he’s as casual as she’s ever seen him in snug jeans and a polo shirt. She can’t help but stare.

“Is this what it’s like, then?” she asks, careful to make clear her sneer. “Being a Jedi? Morning run, take out a Bad Guy, wine and silk sheets?”

“It is what we make of it,” he responds, eyes closed against the glare from outside. “We all have our different tastes.”

“Well yours are shit.”

“Keep telling yourself that, my dear,” he teases, smiling at her with half-opened eyes.

She chews on the end of a finger, considering.

Well. She’s never been one not to take full advantage of a situation, she thinks. That’s her defense, and she’ll stick to it.

“You want me to treat this place like it’s mine, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I can do whatever I want in it.”

“Within reason – with which I’m sure you are well-endowed.”

Ventress flips open the edges of her robe; settles down further into her chair, spreads her legs. Watches Kenobi’s bare foot stop idly tapping on the floor – she rolls her head back, grins at him, beckons.

“Then come here.”

He does. He puts down his glass, pads calmly over the space between them, kneels down. She moans as he licks up sweat from her thighs; when his arms snake around her legs and tug her forward so he has her ass in his hands, she swears and smacks him, digs sharp nails into his hair. His deep-throated laugh sends shockwaves through her clit.

Someone, maybe several someones, can probably see them through the windows when she hisses and shoves him away, and then manhandles him into the bedroom; Ventress doesn’t give a damn. He fights her at every step, pushing hard, insistent kisses into her mouth, not wincing at the marks she leaves on his torso when she pulls off his shirt, only smirking when she laughs at the fact that he’s apparently taken a leaf out of her book and started going commando under his jeans.

This is the first time they’ve ever had sex naked, she thinks distantly. She has him pinned in the mess of sheets, fastening each of his wrists down under her claw-like hands.

“Fuck me, Kenobi,” she whispers, and he groans, surges up beneath her, and does what he’s told.

Ventress halfway wakes up at four in the morning, when the bastard sun is already starting to turn the sky pink. It must have woken Kenobi, too, because he’s leaving drowsy kisses along her neck; and, with one arm looped around her, he’s plucking gently at one of her breasts, rolling the nipple lazily between his fingertips. She must fall asleep again, because when she next opens her eyes he has turned and settled away from her, and is snoring faintly at the back of his throat.

There are two sets of keys sitting in a bowl by the door to the apartment when she tiptoes her way over to it, her shoes in her hand rather than on her feet so as not to wake him. She stands there for what feels like an hour, and feels a drop of sweat bead on the back of her neck as the canicule starts to claim another day.

She grabs one of the keychains, stuffs it in her pocket, and gets back to what it seems she’s best at doing.

Running, running, always running.

*

**TBC**

*


	10. IX - St. Petersburg

*

The Jedi’s operation against Dooku swings into action so quickly that Ventress nearly misses it.

In retrospect, she will shake her head at the signs she has missed from Kenobi over the six months leading up to it. They fuck in Beijing, but the next day, she kills her mark without interference; in Rio, he stops her latest poisoning by kidnapping her away to a cabin in the Serro de Mar, where, by the time she’s had enough of her ways with him, her window of opportunity is long gone; he looks tired, spends hours outside on their little wooden balcony talking into thin air on an encrypted channel when he thinks she’s asleep. She can hear nothing of what he says.

Once, when they’re both in Reykjavik, he’s frowning over his computer so hard that he doesn’t notice she’s close enough to read his screen until it’s too late; she drapes himself over his shoulders, he sighs and looks nettled.

“Who’s ‘darksider’?” she asks, insidiously curious, sucking briefly on his earlobe. “Sounds like a teenage hacker on a power trip.”

“I don’t know.”

“Awful lot of files for someone you don’t know.”

“Mm,” he says, and groans slightly under the ministrations of her hands, which are slipping ever further down his torso. “If my analysis is accurate, he’s plotting to take apart the Jedi network by network until there’s nothing left. He’s claiming responsibility for the death of Windu last month.”

She pauses. Winces. The Cape Town police had only ever found an arm. “Let me look through the files. I might see something you wouldn’t.”

His eyes narrow; she recognizes her transgression immediately, though that doesn’t make her any less peeved at his reaction.

“No,” he says gently, and finally closes the laptop. “They stay far away from you, my dear.”

“Oh? And where’s that, ex _act_ ly?” she purrs, sliding into his lap, her upper lip curling.

“On a hard drive you will never, ever find,” he chuckles, and gasps as she rolls into him.

He sends her a text, finally, to the phone which she’d decided, for twisted reasons best kept to herself, to hold onto rather than discard (he knows it, too, but he doesn’t crow, and clearly still finds it useful). _Stay away from Tangiers_ , it says.

Right. Like that’s going to happen. And anyway, it’s clearly a false trail – there’s nothing going the fuck on in Tangiers that she can tell, and she’s not going to run away and isolate herself on a bluff.

There _is_ , however, plenty of low-level chatter about St. Petersburg. About seeing a Jedi here, another there. A third, a fourth. Skywalker arrives on the fifteenth, Tano on the sixteenth, under their sixth- and seventh-preference aliases.

Dooku has a suite of rooms there, she remembers suddenly. He rents out an entire floor of a luxury hotel, which he stuffs full of heavies to keep any intruders away while he conducts negotiations on his most delicate of deals. Ventress has been there twice. Each time, she’s barely escaped with her life. If the Jedi plan to storm it, then they’re fucking _idiots_.

“Shit,” she breathes, and gets up in a rush in her Los Angeles house to pack a bag. Because yes – they are _just_ that sort of idiots.

When she arrives at the Four Seasons in the old Lion Palace, the lobby staff look so nervous that she knows it’s close. It’s very, very close, and her arrival has probably already been clocked, and god only knows what Dooku and the Jedi both will think of her presence. She slips into a service corridor, checks her multiple weapons – two guns, several clips, her favorite serrated four-inch blades – and advances with both her hands full, sneaking up the first dim staircase she can find. She’s worn flat shoes for the first time in a year, just for the extra burst of speed she knows she’ll need.

When she finds her way up to the fourth floor, she can already hear the shots being fired beyond the locked stairwell door, and her breath catches in her throat. She waits for a period of relative calm – it takes a while – and then shoots out the lock, and rushes headlong into chaos.

Within ten feet, she stumbles over a corpse. There is screaming and shouting everywhere, mostly in Russian, and her sight is obscured by a fug of smoke, both from fire and tear gas – she hauls out a balaclava from her pocket brought just for this purpose, jams it over her head and neck, and barrels on, firing for all she’s worth just to make sure her path is clear.

She runs down one corridor, then another – most of the doors are open, pitched battles or dead bodies spilling out of them. One is slightly ajar, and she can’t risk not clearing it – when she smashes it open with her shoulder an arm wraps so quickly around her neck that she chokes, aloud, and, just as quickly, the pressure suddenly disappears.

“Damn it, Asajj!” Kenobi yells. He’s furious, armed with an AK-47 and a Kevlar vest, but it’s not his torso that needs help – he’s listing badly, blood thick on his right calf.

“Oh, like you’re regretting my being here to save your pert little ass!” she shrieks, raising her voice as high as she can to be heard over the din. Gods, only in Russia – only in Russia would the police not be here by now, only in Russia will this be able to be spun into a tale of domestic terrorism, all the more reason for further repression. “Where’s Dooku?”

“Anakin killed him,” Kenobi yells, peering out the door again. “We’re on our way out.” He looks back at her, frowns, grabs her arm. “Asajj. Wake up. I’ll need you to – ”

She cannot hear a word he’s saying. The roaring in her head is too loud.

“Asajj,” she sees him say, again. He stands on his injured leg, takes a step towards her, tugs down the balaclava, brushes rough, blood-spattered thumbs along her cheeks, along her scars. “I need you to help me,” he says, and now she can hear him, though only as from very far away. “We’ll interlock and frogmarch out, covering as many angles as we can. You hear me?”

She nods, and he replies with one of his own. “On my right. I need all the support I can get on that side.”

Ventress puts a hand into his right armpit, hoisting some of his weight off of his damaged leg; with them facing opposite directions and weapons in their left hands, they cover three hundred and sixty degrees of lines of fire as they jog back down the corridor into the smoke.

“Turn,” Kenobi shouts at one point, and she swivels them at a right angle – she can see the stairwell door that she came through standing open, has a clear shot on the man who’s standing in it, which she takes; he falls. Behind her, Kenobi is spraying their retreat with covering fire – two men scream, one after the other, a grenade goes off unheeded. From somewhere she can’t see, a bullet comes screaming past and nicks her in the side; she snarls, chokes, spits, and carries on.

There is a car waiting to take them away when they stumble out of the back of the hotel; Asajj is exhausted and aching as she throws herself into the back seat, but still peers cautiously out of the blacked-out window as they pull away, ready to take a shot at the incoming, screaming police cars that are swarming into the hotel’s forecourt if necessary.

“Successful, you were?” asks a scratchy voice from the front seat.

Gods, someone is really, _really_ out to ruin Ventress’s life.

“Yes, sir,” Kenobi grits out; he’s ripped off a strip from his shirt and is using it to bind up his leg, wholly unaware of the panic Ventress knows is flashing across her face. “Where are you going?”

“In Sydney, I will start,” Yoda says. His wrinkled hand reaches around the seat as the car speeds up through the evening traffic; his face stays hidden as he holds out a little packet of documents towards Asajj. “To Panama City, you both will go. Wait at least three weeks before making contact, you will.”

Asajj stares at the faked passports and hunches further back in her seat. Eventually Kenobi looks over at her, takes the packet himself, and then reaches out with another strip of shirt in his hand. “Let me see your side.”

“No,” she hisses. She reaches for the doorhandle and pulls; nothing happens, and if anything, the anonymous Jedi driver speeds up. “Stop the car. Let me out.”

“Asajj,” Kenobi says sharply. When she looks reluctantly back at him his face is drawn in tight lines. “This isn’t the moment for your theatrics. You’re _being helped_. Please, just – ” He lets out a quick breath. “Please, not this time.”

She sits still; she lets him slide closer on the blood-slicked leather seats, lets him press the soon-reddened cloth to her side. From the front seat, one beady eye, surrounded by a halo of frazzled white hair, watches her.

There is a private plane waiting for them at an out-of-the-way airport; it stops for fuel in Tokyo, then again in Hawaii. Kenobi sleeps nearly the whole time, collapsed and small-looking in a row of otherwise-empty seats; Ventress paces, watches the sun rise and set outside the tiny, fogged-up windows.

When they finally get to Panama City, they spend their entire three weeks of radio silence in the bedroom. This is, Asajj is surprised to find, a startlingly effective cure for many ills – but it doesn’t change her mind, not anymore.

It’s time for this to end.

*

**TBC**

*


	11. X - No Man's Land

*

It takes her three months after Panama to put all of her plans in place. She spends most of them in Kenobi’s flat in Paris; with her erstwhile boss dead and his associates scattered, she has no desire to draw attention to her location, talents, or whereabouts – not, at least, until she’s sure of the lay of the land. But that’s a moot point, now; she won’t be taking another job, not ever.

Kenobi seems to spend every waking minute that he’s not on new, ever more difficult assignments – and when she doesn’t have him tied up, which she does, frequently and to her great satisfaction – diving deeper into the black hole that is ‘darksider.’ A Jedi is found dead in a pool in Norway; another is stabbed and left to bleed to death in an alleyway in Atlanta. And then the news starts to come in faster, harder – two in Marrakesh. One in Lagos. Three in Mexico City.

Kenobi looks like he’s waiting his turn. Like he’s already given up.

It almost makes Ventress feel guilty for what she’s going to do, but it’s too late now – things are in motion, things she cannot stop, and when it’s December and holiday lights start to illuminate Paris, she takes him to bed with every intention of making it last.

“What brought this on?” he asks at one point, with his forehead pressed to her bosom, leaving kisses along her ribs. He pauses, leaves a thumb on her breast; she knows he can feel her heart racing.

“I need an excuse to mess you up, Kenobi?” she leers, and tugs him up towards her; she leaves deep scratches in his back, fucks him three times before morning and renders him practically unconscious, with an exhausted smile curved across his face even in sleep. At ten a.m., she takes a taxi to Charles de Gaulle, leaving no note.

She’s on the plane, only halfway to the fate waiting for her in London, when her phone starts flashing and does not stop.

There’s been a massacre in Sydney. Another in Montreal. In Lima, in Minneapolis, in Oslo; on every continent, in practically every nation. The Jedi, as an entity, have been wiped from the map.

In Australia, where it started, a civilian has been caught in the crossfire of what the media are describing as a shootout between two rival gangs. She is described as a young, local politician on the up, an idealist, a hope for the future.

Padmé Amidala is dead, and Ventress’s sources say it was Skywalker’s bullet, whether intentional or not, that killed her.

 _darksider_ , she thinks. _A teenager on a power trip._

Once she reaches London, she goes through her motions mechanically. She puts on the three layers of micro-thin Kevlar under her shirt; she cases her fake joint; she follows her fake mark.

When the mark’s fake bodyguard catches sight of her stalking them in Hyde Park at night, he lifts his very real gun, and fires.

Asajj Ventress dies.

The woman that was Asajj Ventress leaves a will. She is to be buried in London, in a small cemetery surrounded by Palladian columns, blinding white. She goes to the funeral to make sure her instructions are carried out; it’s only when she sees a red-headed figure standing over her plot in the rain, black-suited and hands deeply in his pockets, that she realizes she’s made a mistake.

“No, you _fool_ ,” she whispers to herself from the vantagepoint of a nearby rooftop, quickly, frantically scanning what nearby windows she can for any evidence of snipers. “No, no, no – ”

It’s the devil’s own luck that Skywalker must be two steps behind, rather than one. Kenobi remains unharmed as he stands by the grave that is filled only with an empty coffin; he paces slowly back and forth along its length a few times, rubs a hand through his hair and beard. When he finally turns and makes his way back to the street, there is a car waiting for him – the door opens before he reaches it, a young and fear-filled face looks out. Tano, mercifully alive, hopefully to stay so.

The twinge of genuine pity that shudders through Ventress’s thin frame stays with her all the way back to Paris. She slips into the flat late at night, but she feels no need to sleep; she leaves the lights off, slinks silently through the dark, steps behind the half-open bathroom door, and waits.

She’s proved right, as she has been so many times. Kenobi arrives a mere two hours later, his keys rattling in the lock. He turns on a single light; he moves quickly and with purpose, pulling out a duffel bag from a closet, throwing into it three or four changes of clothes. He draws a knife from his pocket, kneels, pries open a section of sideboard in the living room – he blows dust off of the piles of passports and multiple forms of currency he pulls out of the cubbyhole beyond, scrutinizes them carefully for any signs of damage, and puts them in the bag too before carefully replacing the removed siding.

He keeps a stack of trashy paperback novels by his bedside – too much time in airports, he’d shrugged once, though Ventress has always suspected that he uses them to quiet an over-busy mind. He crouches by it; he runs his fingers along several spines, then pulls out the fifth book down, causing a few of the others to tumble and scatter. He opens it to a seemingly random page, and peers into it with a most curious, tired, overwhelmed expression.

When Kenobi closes the book again, with a snap, it sounds too heavy. It sounds like there’s something inside it, and Asajj can very well guess what – his secret hard drive, which is now the key to destroying what he’d thought was an enemy and turned out to be a brother. He stuffs the book inside his leather jacket, zips it up, and turns; he hauls the duffel bag over his shoulder, drapes a beanie over his hair. For all anyone on the street would know, he’s a scruffy tourist on his way home.

Asajj scours her near-photographic memory, counts downwards through the stack of novels.

It’s called _The Book of Luke_. Whether that matters, she has no idea.

Kenobi is walking through the apartment now; he plucks a dried, stunted leaf off of the forlorn bonsai tree, straightens a crooked painting on the wall, makes sure the cabinets are closed. Why he’s bothering, she has no idea – Skywalker isn’t going to use this place, or have it watched. In Paris, he can probably get away with a firebombing.

Kenobi pauses. Tilts his head, silhouetted by streetlights.

“Asajj?” he whispers. His free hand, the one that isn’t clutching the duffel’s strap, hangs by his side as though he expects someone, ghostly or otherwise, to take it.

She holds her breath, and doesn’t move.

His fist clenches. He walks forward, his head lowered; he picks up his set of keys from the sideboard, steps out into the corridor, locks the door behind him.

Asajj Ventress watches Obi-Wan Kenobi be swallowed up by Paris, and then she disappears herself.

*

**FIN**

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm also uploading a fanmix to round this out - otherwise, that's your lot, folks! Thank you so so much for your comments and for sticking with this fic for so long <3


	12. Fanmix

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Fanmix for  _Mercy is the Mighties' Jewel_ , by akathecentimetre/commonplacecaz.

[LISTEN](http://8tracks.com/commonplacecaz/mercy-is-the-mighties-jewel)

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End file.
